BLACKBIRD ROOK & OTTER SURF BOARDS
Blackbird Rook has partnered with Otter Surfboards to create a growing series of limited edition artist surfboards – fully functional wooden boards, handcrafted in Otter’s Cornish workshop, and conceived in dialogue with a small group of thoughtful contemporary artists. Each board is produced in an edition of three, combining Otter’s environmentally conscious craftsmanship with the language, imagination and material sensibilities of the artists involved. What began as a simple collaboration has become a way of expanding where art can appear and how it can be lived with: on the wall, in the studio, and out on the water.
The first five artists in the project – Douglas White, Liam Fallon, Joe Cheetham, Hannah Murgatroyd and Christina Barrera – bring distinct and quietly surprising approaches. From White’s octopus-ink drawings to Fallon’s sculptural designs, Cheetham’s vivid figuration, Murgatroyd’s psychologically tuned compositions and Barrera’s rich, material narratives, each artist reimagines the surfboard as both object and surface. The result is a series that sits between fine art, craft and surf culture, opening up a different way of thinking about how artworks move through the world.
